Towse: views from the hill

April 8, 2009

Read-it-First with Suzanne Beecher

Filed under: books,mystery,writers — Towse @ 1:48 am

Read-it-First with Suzanne Beecher

Join St. Martin’s Read-it-First e-mail book club and sample a hot NEW release each week. Each weekday morning, we’ll send you a taste of the week’s featured title right to your inbox. By the end of the week, you’ll have read approximately a few chapters, enough to decide whether it is the right book for you…sometimes just before it even hits the stores!

And it’s all completely FREE!

I signed up just in time. Next week (April 13th) is featuring Louise Ure’s latest: LIARS ANONYMOUS.

    Click cover image for more info.

Simon Wood on writing with dyslexia

Filed under: books,mystery,video,writers,writing — Towse @ 12:41 am

TV interview on ABC News 10′s Sacramento and Co.

Simon talks about dyslexia and his writing and the back doors you learn to use to do what you want to do when the dyslexia is holding you back. Simon, for those who don’t know him, writes thrillers (as Simon Wood) and horror (as Simon Janus) and (under yet another pseudonym, Simon Oaks) has a nonfiction book out last month, WILL MARRY FOR FOOD SEX AND LAUNDRY.

Simon’s Web site

March 30, 2009

Book trailers.

Filed under: book promotion,books,video — Towse @ 3:28 pm

Book trailers are like movie trailers, in a way. Movie trailers cut and piece from the movie to give you a taste of what you will see when you see the movie, to lure you into the theater to buy a ticket.

Book trailers are a video advertisement for a written book. They cut and piece from the book — add sound, action, pictures, sometimes live actors — and turn the result into what would be a mini-trailer for the movie the book would be if the book were a movie. The hope is that you will see the trailer and buy the book.

Came across this one just now and thought it was a good example.

There was a panel that included some talk on book trailers at LCC a few weeks ago. You can make your own trailer for something less than $100 (and up) and post it on Facebook or your blog or you can pay one of the companies that know what they’re doing (Circle of Seven Productions was specifically named) and for something in the range of $2K-3K (although the price can be much higher, depending on your needs) you get a professional video and the placement/marketing expertise of the company. Or you can make your own trailer and contract with a company like Circle of Seven to do the promotion.

Book trailers as advertisement. As lures. With hopes that the trailer will go viral and the fever will translate into sales.

This trailer (Michael Connelly, THE BRASS VERDICT) is a more sophisticated production with screenplay and actors.

Would you buy a book from a book trailer?

Do you ever send them on?

March 17, 2009

Christopher G. Moore and Christopher Moore

Filed under: books,writers,writing — Towse @ 5:59 pm

Christopher G. Moore was at Left Coast Crime 2009.
Christopher Moore was not.

The book dealer who brought Christopher Moore’s books to sell to conference attendees didn’t know the difference, or thought that conference attendees didn’t. No excuse, really. The list of conference attendees included a hot link to Christopher G. Moore’s Web site where ’tis obvious he writes a very different tale than Christopher not-G Moore.

Imagine your surprise if you’d purchased a Christopher Moore book from the book dealer and, having reached the head of the “have Christopher Moore sign your book” line, you discovered the Christopher Moore (Christopher G. Moore) in front of you looked nothing like the author photo on the (Christopher Moore) book you had in hand.

Here’s the basic difference ‘twixt the two:

“Think Dashiell Hammett in Bangkok.” —San Francisco Chronicle (Christopher G. Moore)

“Moore’s storytelling style is reminiscent of Vonnegut and Douglas Adams.” — Philadelphia Inquirer (Christopher Moore)

Now you know …

Buy either. Buy both. Different reads. Very different reads. Both worth reading.

January 17, 2009

Malcolm Gladwell on spaghetti sauce | Video on TED.com

Filed under: books,people,San Francisco,writing — Towse @ 3:26 am

Malcolm Gladwell on spaghetti sauce

The videos at ted.com are pretty cool.

We saw Malcolm Gladwell (author of The Tipping Point, Blink, and — most recently — Outliers and also staff writer for The New Yorker) last night at the City Arts & Lectures series at Herbst Theatre (“in conversation” with Kevin Berger, Salon) with tickets my brother gave his nibs for Christmas.

What a funny, bright guy Gladwell is. Sharp. Verbal. Quick.

I really don’t care if you think he dumbs down science or puts his own spin on things. I think he’d be a great guy to hang out with at a coffee shop and discuss the world and what he was working on.

I’ll be looking for his writing in The New Yorker even more than I was before.

Bits from last night.

KB: You start Outliers talking about hockey players (and why successful professional hockey players are usually born in January, February, and March). Why?

MG: Well, because I’m Canadian.

Jeb Bush quote about the struggles he had to reach where he is today, which MG characterized as an “heroic struggle against advantage.”

MG talked about the Beatles and how they became the best band evah. He mentioned that most people don’t consider the fact that for years before they came to America and were discovered, they’d been the house band at a Hamburg strip club where they played eight hours a day for six days a week. Live. On stage. They were playing live (and getting better and better) for thousands of hours before they “made it.”

“We have chosen to overlook the extraordinary discipline they devoted to their vocation.”

We say, oh, they’re talented. Or oh, they’re lucky. They were neither. They played over a thousand live gigs before they “made it.”

The talk was very interesting. Interesting enough that I’m Googling (Hi, Sergey! Hi, Larry!) as I speak. How many other videos are there out there of Gladwell doing his schtick.

He closed with a discussion of his mother, a brown Jamaican (as he called her), mixed race, and the advantages she had, and her parents, and her parents parents going back that made her what she is today.

His point is that just because you live here and are successful and don’t worry where your next meal is coming from or where the fresh water is or the fuel you need to cook … this all isn’t due to the fact you worked so hard and sacrificed and were lucky but is more due to the fact that you were born into circumstances that put you where you are today.

Don’t forget that.

Don’t forget that those in less fortunate circumstances weren’t born to your parents.

Or, as Phil Ochs would say

January 12, 2009

/ BLOG / Bookride

Filed under: blog,books,bookstores — Towse @ 11:03 pm

Bookride, a blog from ANY AMOUNT OF BOOKS, 56 Charing Cross Road, London.

“a guide to the most wanted and collected books. There is some evaluation of why the book is wanted, what it is worth – with a range of selling prices, some trivia, apercus and bon mots, a few anecdotes, so called jokes and occasional rants.”

Entertaining blog for book huggers.

Walkaround yesterday.

Filed under: books,bookstores,life,San Francisco — Towse @ 6:48 pm

Started out just after 1P. Stomach still gurgling from too much fish & chips at the Duke the night before at the Mx meetup. And I’d ordered the small portion! Not used to fried fish no more. …

We decided that on our way to chk out the rental (we’re meeting the new tenant there today and didn’t want to be surprised by some horrible something) we’d stop at an Open House I was curious about and then wander over to the rental and on to elsewhere.

We set out first to find the Tatiana statue that’s been hidden off the Greenwich Steps. Not so “hidden” anymore. Someone’s chalked TIGER –> arrows on the Steps to point out the side path where the statue’s been placed. Walked back up the steps to verify the location of a GWSF photo. Walked over to Russian Hill and stopped at 1145 Vallejo.

1145 Vallejo
SFH. 3BR 2.5BA sep gdn apt. (“legal” the blurb sheet sez, but only because there’s no stove — only a microwave oven — so it’s considered a guest room with separate entrance, I think. Perhaps the “legal” means that the lower level re-do into guest quarters was done with permits.) Pkg. (Actually, once we saw it, we decided “Pkg” was “parking for two Minis” or “parking for a Mini and “that Smart car I plan to win at the Tel Hi North Beach Citizens raffle”)

Only $1.495m (marked down on the blurb sheet from $1.625m).

Deals abound in San Francisco real estate! Nice wood floors. Maple on the staircase w/ a great banister. Oak on the floors. Gas stove. Yard. Spruced up and all. Quiet street. (Street stops at Jones, so there’s not much through traffic.) No views. Only!! $1.495m. Kee-ripes. There must still be people these days with cash in their pockets or something. I would not want to be an appraiser in this market. Where are the comps? What is a place worth? (Whatever anyone is willing to pay.) How much should a bank lend?

From Vallejo we walked down to Polk and poked around in antique and cool-stuff shops, Walgreen’s. Walked over to the rental to make sure everything was set for the meet with the new tenant today. We walked down Laguna to Fort Mason and stopped by Book Bay, the Friends of the Library Bookstore, to … um … browse

We browsed. I browsed through the ($0.50 or 3/$1) tables. His nibs browsed through the Californiana and elsewhere. I browsed elsewhere. We wound up with the following, which include a couple San Francisciana books:

Ruth Newhall San Francisco’s Enchanted Palace 1967 HB $30 – his nibs was quite intrigued by this book about the Palace of Fine Arts. The book was dust-jacketed and wrapped in Bro-Dart cello and had ephemera tucked inside dealing with the initial setup and publicity for the Exploratorium. The ephemera really sealed the deal for his nibs, who is a huge Exploratorium fan. The splurge for the day.

Jerry Flamm Good Life in Hard Times: San Francisco’s ’20s and ’30s $5 TPB
Patricia Highsmith Plotting & Writing Suspense Fiction HB $5
1930 Annualog (Sci Am Pub Co) HB $5
Lee G. Miller An Ernie Pyle Album: Indiana to Ie Shima 1st. HB $5

on the 3/$1 tables
Round Up: the stories of Ring W. Lardner (Scribner. c 1924, 26, 29) HB
Jacqueline Winspear Pardonable Lies HB 2005 1st
Lee Child Bad Luck and Trouble BookClub 2007
Joyce C Oates. Beasts Carroll &Graf “copyright TK” (TK???)
Angus McDonald The Five Foot Road: in search of Vanished China SC. 1st ed.
Dunning – Booked to Die PB
William Murray – Tip on a Dead Crab PB
Gallagher Gray – Death of a Dream Maker PB (GG pseud for Katy Munger)
Wm Faulkner – Six mystery stories: Knight’s Gambit (who knew Faulkner wrote mystery short stories? I didn’t.)

I had my Friends of the Library card, which gives me 10% off, plus my once-a-year coupon for 25% off, so my grand total was $35 or so after the discounts. Not bad for books enough to keep me entertained for quite a while and a couple of good San Francisciana books.

I’d remembered to bring not only the once-a-year coupon but also a cloth shoulder bag, so we piled most of the books in the bag (they didn’t all fit), took the rest in a smaller paper bag, and lugged them up and over the hills home.

home-> Vallejo 0.9m
Vallejo -> rental 1.1m
rental -> Book Bay 0.7m
Book Bay -> home 2.0m

for walkaround total of 4.7m.

Today we’ll do the walk to rental on a more direct route (1.8m) then to dinner at Isa (0.8m). (We haven’t been in what seems like a long while and we’ll be so much closer than we usually are!) And then home (2.4m).

5m total. How did that happen?

December 26, 2008

Coming Soon to the Tenderloin: Another Dirty, Poorly Lit Place For Books

Filed under: books,bookstores,San Francisco — Towse @ 9:46 pm

Coming Soon to the Tenderloin: Another Dirty, Poorly Lit Place For Books [SFWeekly - The Snitch]

Oh. Now. How come I never knew this bookstore existed until this morning when I was wandering through old links, one of which told tales of this place?

Now it’s gone (possibly to be phoenix’d … some day …).

The pics remind me of Woodruff & Thush, a used bookstore down by San Jose State, a used bookstore my older brother and I used to love. (And hate … Case had a lovely rant about the time he found a great book at a terrific price and brought it to the cash register only to have Craig Thush tell him that he hadn’t repriced the book in a very long time and he was repricing the book on the spot. Couldn’t argue with Thush. …)

I would’ve bought Woodruff & Thush out lock, stock & barrel when Craig Thush decided to retire in 2003 if I could’ve. I still have plenty of books I bought there in my impoverished young adulthood, including a Difco manual I got for cheaps when I was taking Microbiology 101.

Here’s hoping McDonald’s reopens and I get a crack at browsing the stacks some day soon.

December 18, 2008

Acclaimed Colombian Institution Has 4,800 Books and 10 Legs

Filed under: books,libraries,nonprofits,travel — Towse @ 7:09 pm

Acclaimed Colombian Institution Has 4,800 Books and 10 Legs [NYTimes article]

Great story of Alfa and Beto, the biblio burros, Luis Soriano, their keeper, and the mission they’ve devoted ten years’ of weekends to.

November 26, 2008

Stephen King’s God trip | Salon Books

Filed under: books,writing — Towse @ 1:34 am

[you have an ad clickthrough before salon.com feeds you the content]

Stephen King’s God trip

On the 30th anniversary of “The Stand,” the novelist confesses what haunts him about religion and today’s politics.

By John Marks

Oct. 23, 2008 | In 1927, a little-known writer of horror stories named H.P. Lovecraft tried to put into words the secret of his diabolical craft. “The one test of the really weird is simply this,” Lovecraft wrote in the introduction to “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” “whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread and of contact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes or entities on the known universe’s utmost rim.”

That’s a mouthful, and yet I swear, two decades or so ago, I had the very experience that Lovecraft describes while on an overnight bus trip from Dallas to a Christian youth camp in northern Minnesota. Most of the other teen campers flirted or gossiped or joked around. Some endured the long hours by reading Scripture, and in their own way, may have been grappling with “the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities.” I was mesmerized by a less prescriptive but equally god-smitten work: Stephen King’s epic of apocalypse, “The Stand.”

This year, the novel “The Stand” turns 30, and far from fading into the dustbin of bygone bestsellers, King’s great tale of plague seems more prescient than ever.

[more]

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